


Sam, Lost

by RubyofRaven



Series: Formative Narratives [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trans, Angst, Bad Parent John Winchester, Bittersweet, Bittersweet Ending, Brothers, Canonical Character Death, Childhood Memories, Depressed Sam Winchester, Depression, Dreams, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Hurt, Family, Family Issues, Femininity, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Grief/Mourning, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Memories, Past Character Death, Past Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Past Relationship(s), Patriarchy, Siblings, Trans Character, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27926578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubyofRaven/pseuds/RubyofRaven
Summary: Looking back, you think Dean was probably mad that this was the only story your dad would tell about your mother. Dad loved your mom so much, and you know he has to have good memories of her. But he never talks about them. About the good times, the times you can’t remember, and that Dean thinks he remembers more than he probably actually does. No, your dad only repeats the bad memory, the worst memory. The only memory of her you have.“I remember fire,” you once told Dean.“No,” he told you with surprising intensity, “You don’t.”“I dream about it sometimes,” you insisted.“Dreams aren’t real,” Dean said.Fifteen years later, after you’ve watched your own dreams burn up the same way your mother did, you suppose he’s right. Dreams aren’t real. But that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt.-----Takes place following the events of “Sam, 22.”
Relationships: Dean Winchester & John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Series: Formative Narratives [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964140
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	Sam, Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! 
> 
> My awesome and amazing friend Ruby of Raven has kindly posted this fic on her account for me. She’s been incredibly helpful and supportive, so shout out to her! This fic is the third installment to my series “Formative Narratives,” in which Sam is male to female transgender and growing up/having grown up in an intensly isolated, maculine, and patriarchal familial situation - and how that situation, and later the loss of Jess, has shaped her idenity. Feel free to read this fic as is, but it will probably make more sense if you read “Sam, I am,” and “Sam, 22” first.
> 
> The main warning I would like to give is that Sam is repeatedly misgendered by some characters in this fic and struggles to address her identity with her family. Also, there are descriptions of grief (and some less-than-healthy coping mechanisms mentioned), so please be aware of that. 
> 
> Disclaimer, I do not own _Supernatural_ or any of its characters, plot events, etc.
> 
> A second disclaimer, I do not identfy as transgender. I have endeavored to address, specifically, themes of transgender identity - and more broadly themes of gender - with sensitivety and respect for how complex, varied, and beautiful every person’s unique identity is. 
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> -MMR

There’s this story that your father used to tell. It was the only bedtime story he ever told you. 

He’d be sitting, nearly slumped over, at whatever cheap table the latest dive motel room was furnished with, surrounded by empty bottles. When he’d had too much beer (or whiskey, or vodka, or _whatever_ ) that’s when the ghosts would come out of his head. The ghosts of his past, his grief, his _lonely broken aching love anger_ \- the only kinds of ghosts he never learned to kill. 

They haunted him, and he let them haunt you, too.

“You were crying and she went to find you,” he’d say, “Then I went to find her, and she was on the ceiling, bleeding down… it was like red raindrops. I saw yellow eyes. Then she was burning. The flames were yellow and red, and I couldn’t reach her. I grabbed you and gave you to your brother and told him to run. I didn’t want to leave her. How could I leave her?”

Around this point Dean would normally grab you and a blanket and decide the two of you should have a slumber party in the bathroom. You’d curl up together in the tub with the blanket pulled up half over your face. The porcelain was always cold, but your brother was warm beside you and there was a door to shut out your dad and his ghosts.

Looking back, you think Dean was probably mad that this was the only story your dad would tell about your mother. Dad loved your mom so much, and you know he has to have good memories of her. But he never talks about them. About the good times, the times you can’t remember, and that Dean thinks he remembers more than he probably actually does. No, your dad only repeats the bad memory, the worst memory. The only memory of her you have.

“I remember fire,” you once told Dean.

“No,” he told you with surprising intensity, “You don’t.”

“I dream about it sometimes,” you insisted.

“Dreams aren’t real,” Dean said.

Fifteen years later, after you’ve watched your own dreams burn up the same way your mother did, you suppose he’s right. Dreams aren’t real. But that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt.

\------------------------------

As you drive away from Palo Alto on the night Jess burned and took your life with her, your brother speaks only once.

“Sorry, man,” Dean says. “I guess you really loved her.”

You clench your ashy fists and let your temple bump against the cold glass of the window. The past tense and the uncertainty and the misgendering and your brother’s stupid face, it all hurts, but you’re already in too much pain to wince. 

And because Jess is gone forever, you say,

“Always.”

\------------------------------

For a while after Jess dies, you are numb. You don’t know if it’s because the pain has receded and there's nothing left inside you, or if you’ve been in pain so constantly that you just can’t register it anymore.

But for a while you are in too much pain, and then too numb, for the hurt of misgendering to register. Everything hurts, so what’s one more pain? 

Besides, this is a pain you know how to live through. It’s like when you dump whiskey on an open wound - you just have to force yourself to breathe through the first sharp burn, and then remind yourself the aching numbness that follows is a relief. 

You don’t know how to live with the pain of having lost Jess. So you try to remember how you lived before you knew she existed. Maybe if you can be that person again, you won’t miss her so much. 

Maybe you wouldn’t feel like jagged pieces of a person.

\------------------------------

At some point during your adolescence, you realized your dad wasn’t… whole. He was a half-present human being propelled along by alcohol and vengeance and forward momentum - and sometimes the vague, secondary memory that he had kids to keep alive. 

You remember looking at your father one day, seeing his pain, his sharp edges, and wondering if grief shatters people. Leaves them lying in shards on the floor like a broken pane of glass. 

Leaves them there just waiting to cut anyone who gets close, no matter how smooth the edges look from far away.

That moment was the first time you promised yourself you would never be like your father.

Now, though, now that you’ve lost your own love and felt yourself shatter, you don’t know if you can keep it.

You think of Jess, of kissing her goodbye and following your brother into the night. You think of unspoken vows: _to return, to stay, everything will be alright._

And, well, it wouldn’t be the first promise you’ve broken lately.

\------------------------------

Your entire childhood, you thought Dad and Dean were wrong to try and avenge your mother because it wouldn't fix things. But now you see maybe it's not about fixing. It’s not about finding a way to patch things up and make life better. 

It's about having a reason to keep living. 

And it might not be a good one, but it is an effective one.

The life you made for yourself has been taken, Jess's life has been taken, so why should the yellow-eyed demon get to live?

He’s dogged you through two lives now.

Your first life that was: pain and hiding. Your second life that was: happiness, right up until it was fire. Now you've run from it's ruins right back to the first one.  
There must be something poetic in that, though you're too tired to figure out what it is.

You have nothing left but your brother and the world your father created for the two of you, and maybe your father himself, if you can ever find him. So you just sort of - let yourself go.

Let yourself get lost in the rules of your first life. Hunt things. Save people. Kill the yellow-eyed demon.

Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists.

\-------------------------------

One night, after too much beer and not enough sleep, you sit slumped at a cheap motel table. 

“Sometimes I think I only started living when I met Jess,” you tell Dean, “and that I stopped with her, too.”

Dean’s gaze shoots to you from whatever ‘80s action movie is playing on the tv. You can see him shift on the bed, his shoulders straightening against the scratched up headboard.

“Hey, man,” he says. “You’re still alive.”

You’d roll your eyes if you weren’t too tired, and if it didn’t make the room spin in a nauseating way. 

Vaguely, you think you should tell him you’re a woman. Jess was a woman, too. You miss her. You left her. How could you leave her?

“There’s more to living than breathing, Dean,” you say.

Your brother leans forward just the slightest bit - or maybe that was you swaying in your chair - it’s hard to tell, especially with how your vision is starting to blur. You’d think you were about to cry, but you’re pre-Jess you now, and pre-Jess you wasn’t allowed to cry.

“Yeah, well, breathing’s a pretty good foundation,” Dean says, his gaze unwavering. “And you’re going to keep breathing.”

You’re too drunk and too tired to say anything sharp back. So you let your head rest against the table and hope you don’t dream of fire.

\------------------------------

It’s another night of another week of another month and you are laying in a lumpy bed in another run down motel. You don’t really bother keeping track of things anymore. It’s easier to get lost in them that way. You finished another hunt today, but you’re still frustratingly far from any leads to finding your father or the yellow-eyed demon. 

Dean, for the first time in ages, decides to go out to some dive bar and he evidently gets lucky, seeing as it’s 4:00 am and he still hasn’t returned. This motel is pretty far out of town and when Dean left he took the impala - and all the alcohol the two of you own - with him. The hypocrite.

You’ve been lying in bed, both listless and sleepless, for the better part of three hours when you realize you weren’t there for Jess’s funeral. You were ready to marry her, to stay by her side the rest of your life, and you didn’t even stay long enough to make sure she was buried right.

You feel like you’ve failed her. But you already failed her on much higher stakes. 

So you let another piece of yourself fall away, and struggle to muster the energy to turn your head far enough to look at the alarm clock.

You watch the glowing green numbers until they hit 8:00 am and you hear the impala rumble into the parking lot.

\-------------------------------

Another day you’re at a diner. You managed to get a few hours of sleep last night, so you actually take time to look at the menu instead of just ordering whatever artery-clogging monstrosity is the special today. Nothing ever sounds good exactly, but you manage to muster enough presence of mind to choose something healthy.

When it arrives, Dean makes fun of your chicken cherry salad.

“Dude, you eat like a girl on a diet. If you ditch the sissy food and get some real food -like a burger - you might finally fill out a bit.”

You have absolutely no desire to “fill out.” Your arms are lean but toned, you don’t need bulging biceps to broaden your shoulders.

“There’s nothing girly about eating vegetables, and there’s nothing manly about eating meat. The only distinction in our foods is whether you’ll need bypass surgery before fifty,” you say, scowling.

Dean snorts, “You look exactly like dad when you make that face.”

“I am _nothing_ like Dad,” you bite out.

“Geez, you don’t have to be so defensive. I know you guys had your beef, but the man did raise us,” Dean says, tone light.

“He left us alone for weeks on end,” you say.

Grudgingly, on some level you do understand your dad loved you, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do a crappy job parenting you. That he didn’t make the wrong choices. That you have to forgive him.

“I’d hardly call that getting raised,” you say.

“ _I_ wasn’t alone until you ran off to college,” Dean says, suddenly serious.

“Oh, and you got raised. I made sure of that,” he says before he leaves to go up to the counter and pay the check.

He seems upset. Offended on a personal level, and it confuses you. Dean knows Dad’s an asshole, but he’s also always defended him to you. It shouldn’t surprise you he’s still doing it. 

But - something about the end of that conversation was off, almost like it wasn’t about your father at all anymore.

There’s something important in that, but you’re too angry and too tired to bother trying to figure out what it is.

\------------------------------

You’re lying in bed again, unable to rest again. 

At some point you manage to get halfway asleep. You are just sort of drifting in that liminal space, when you think you catch a whiff of vanilla, and this memory comes to you, sudden and clear. 

Jess was telling you about a paper she was writing for her psych class. She was frustrated she was only pulling a B in the class, but she was so excited about her essay topic. You either never caught her thesis, or you forgot it (and if you were awake you’d feel guilty about that. Or you wouldn’t because you’re pre-Jess you now, damnit).

She told you, “People don’t forget pain. Even repressed memories are still there. Our brains are wired to remember pain, so we can learn to avoid it. But we never forget it.”  
You spent the rest of that evening eating pizza, lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor, as you worked late into the night on your respective assignments. It was so simple, and you were so happy.

You think about trying to forget Jess. To make the _aching echoing loss_ feeling leave your bones.

You think about how trying to forget the bad also meant you repressed the joy, too. It seems so long since you’ve felt happy. 

Jess never told you if joy was hardwired the same way pain is. 

You drift at the edge between awake and asleep, at the edge between the past and the present, joy and pain. 

And you wonder.

\------------------------------

The next day, or maybe the next week, Dean catches you staring at a picture of Jess on your phone. You’re driving to the next town for the next hunt and Dean looks over at you at the exact wrong moment. 

If you were seventeen, you’d tell him to keep his eyes on the road, but now that’s just another thing you used to care about that you don’t really see the point of.

The picture is the only thing that you have that proves Jess was real.

Well, that and the flannel at the bottom of your duffle. The one that smells of smoke and vanilla, that you try to hide beneath the shirts you’ve stolen from your brother.

(His shirts are kind of too broad, but the bagginess means he’s never stopped thinking you’re a boy. That’s just another conversation you’re too tired to have.)

It’s easier not to look at the picture, but today you can’t resist. 

Jess’s smile hurts and heals at the same time.

“You don’t talk about her much,” Dean says, “for how much you say she meant to you.”

You don’t really want to talk about Jess (you always want to talk about her), and especially not to Dean (he’s the only person you want to talk to nowadays).

“You don’t believe me?” you ask.

Dean shrugs, his hands loosely gripping the steering wheel as he keeps his gaze straight ahead.

“No,” he says after a moment. “No, I guess Dad never talked much about mom, either.”

You can tell your brother’s feeling a little awkward by the tense set of his shoulders, but also that he’s being pretty earnest. This isn’t some off-hand remark about your superficial facial resemblance to your father. 

Comparing you and Jess to your parents is, for Dean, a pretty strong acknowledgement of the seriousness of your relationship. He might think that’s comforting, but it sends a chill down your spine. It passes quickly, but it’s the first thing other than numbness or pain you’ve truly felt in a long time. 

The discomfort lingers.

Because Dean’s concept of romantic love - deep, committed love - is based on fragmented memories of your parents together and your dad’s behavior since the nursery fire. And that hits hard. 

You’ve been following exactly in your father’s footsteps, and that’s never something you wanted. 

Your father’s devotion to your late mother has always been the strongest example of love you’ve seen, but it’s been twisted by perpetual grief. _He_ has been so twisted by grief - and that it is never something you wanted to imitate. 

You don’t want your love to turn into that.

You loved Jess so much, and she loved you, and you don’t want that to become so warped you don’t recognize it. 

_You_ don’t want to become someone Jess wouldn’t recognize.

You think: _who am I?_

You’ve been drifting blindly, guided by vengeance, and alcohol, and the vague secondary memory that your brother needs you.

You’ve been dressing as a man, responding to male pronouns, and you have no future plans. No lists, no hope. 

You’ve become everything your father taught you to be either through words or example - everything you can only assume he intended for you to be. 

You want very few things these days, and even less of them are possible.

But you don’t want that.

\------------------------------

You consider this life of motels, and hunting, and family expectations, and being called _Sammy_. Of pain and longing and anger and silence. You ran from this life once already - but maybe that's not completely true. 

There’s a whole lot of bad memories featuring Dad and Dean from your childhood, but you also can recall the cold of the bathtub and the warmth of Dean’s shoulder beneath your head. The few good memories you have from back then involve your brother, too.

You ran from a life dictated by your father. A life you’re starting to suspect your brother was trapped in too, in his own way, even if he never realized it.

Maybe, somewhere in that realization, there’s hope.

Because things with Dean aren’t easy - they never have been - but he’s all you have. 

You think of Jess, of how her hair looked in the morning before she brushed it, of how she used to chew her nails when she was thinking, of how she made everything feel better than good. Of how losing her felt like losing yourself. If you had followed your father’s plan, you never would have known she existed. And you’ve tried, _god you’ve tried_ , but you can’t imagine having never met her. Having never loved or been loved by her.

You left the world your father created around you. Your brother never did. He never learned what else was out there - bad or good.

Perhaps you could show your brother that there are other choices, that the real world is bigger than the one your father told you to live in.

Maybe you could work together to form another life. 

Maybe people aren’t like glass. Maybe they’re like trees, maybe they can grow back together, bent or twisted or scarred, but eventually whole again. Splinters dulled, jagged edges smoothed over enough so that no one else gets hurt.

Maybe that’s a reason to live, _and_ a way to make things less bad.

You're still trying to find your father and kill the yellow-eyed demon. For once, you, your brother, and your father all have the same goal. 

But after you kill the demon, you don't have to stay with your father. After, you'll see. 

_After._

You still don’t know who you are without Stanford and Jess, but that's the first time since she died you've really considered a future. 

It's not sad or happy. Maybe it's both. 

It's definitely something new.

\---------------------------

You sit in the impala beside your brother as he merges onto the interstate, and stare at your phone screen filled with Jess’s slightly pixelated, smiling face - and for the first time in _days weeks months_ you let yourself get lost in your memories.

Jess was always horrible with directions. 

You grew up navigating the country, but Jess couldn’t even make it two blocks without somehow finding a wrong turn. 

For your second date, she’d suggested you meet at a new coffee shop she’d heard about downtown. On the day you were supposed to meet, she turned up at the café sixteen minutes late with two corn dogs she’d somehow picked up along the way. She’d smiled so wide her eyes crinkled in the corners, and apologized, and held one out to you.

So you ate corn dogs and drank cappuccinos, and towards the end of the date you asked her why she didn’t just ask to meet at the campus coffee shop if she had so much trouble getting to this one.

She told you, “The thing about being lost is that sometimes you find things you weren’t even looking for.”

You consider your life post-Jess, and your brother, and the concept of _after_ , and you think she may have been right.

**Author's Note:**

> I am in the process of writing part IV of this series (and this time I have more of it done, so while I can’t promise a specific time to post it, it will hopefully be finished sooner than part III was).
> 
> -MMR


End file.
